


Broken World

by ponderinfrustration



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War I, Established Relationship, F/M, Grief, Mourning, Post-War, referenced character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:41:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24823258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration
Summary: Raoul comes home from the war, but he is not the man he was before. Christine thinks on all that has been, and has come to be
Relationships: Raoul de Chagny/Christine Daaé
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	Broken World

**Author's Note:**

> I passed the 1 million words of fic mark the other day, so I wrote this short little thing to celebrate. Named after the poem 'September 1918' by Amy Lowell

Her husband comes home from the war, but he is not the man he was before.

It’s nothing that he says, nothing that he does. It’s a quietness in how he moves, a shadow in his eyes, a thinness he never had before. The way he wakes in the night and lies silent beside her, not touching her. And how, every morning, he seems more tired than the night before.

They do not speak of the war. He does not breathe a word of it, and she does not ask. It has become a silence that they waltz around, every day, from morning to night.

She is not sure he has smiled in all of the nine months since he came home.

* * *

He went to the war, and she became a nurse in a hospital in Paris. A volunteer, making tea and bringing bandages. And when some of the other nurses transferred to clearing stations and hospitals out of the city, she learned about dressing wounds, and speaking quietly to the men who had been gassed.

She knows something of what he saw out there.

(The things he sees behind his eyes are so much worse than she will ever know.)

* * *

He smokes.

He never used to smoke before.

* * *

She does not sing, now.

It does not seem right to sing, after all that has happened.

The opera continues, but they have not been. He has not suggested it, and she has not asked.

It is a part of their life that is over, that belongs in the time before.

She is not sure she will ever sing again.

* * *

She wonders what became of those boys she knew in the corps de ballet. Did they go off to fight? And if they did, how many of them have come back?

The old Persian. She used to see him sometimes, in the street, but it has been years, now. Years, and the last time he came to see her, it was shortly after she’d gotten the news.

She offered him tea, and he accepted it quietly, and as they sat there, it was almost like how the old days had been, but she knew why he had come and knew it was not the secret they have shared for so long.

He squeezed her hand, and his face was grave. “I want to—to express my sincere condolences.”

She nodded, and swallowed. “Thank you.”

* * *

“A terrible thing to have happened.”

A terrible thing, the worst, almost.

* * *

She does not know if Erik yet lives.

She is not sure she wants to know.

* * *

There was a boy from somewhere in Ireland, Belfast she thinks. One of his legs blown off, his throat bandaged, hiding where a piece of shrapnel had slashed him as it whizzed by, to bury itself in the man behind him and take his life instead. And the boy did not speak, he just lay there, wrapped in white and silent, but she never missed the tears that slipped from his eyes.

Her English has always been halting, better read than spoken, but only if she gives herself enough time. And she sat beside him, one day, and read him a letter that had come from an aunt, what she could read of it, what was not censored in black. And his fingers clenched the bedsheets until his knuckles were the same white, and when she asked him, slowly, trying to frame the words properly for him to understand, if he wanted to write back, he just shook his head, and lay there, silent, until she left again.

* * *

Just once did he say anything. “How can I tell them of this?”

How?

* * *

How?

* * *

Just once has Raoul made love to her since he came back, just once. Carefully, slowly, his kisses as faint as if they were not there, as if he was afraid she would break. And afterwards she held him as he sobbed, and shook, and slept, and he never saw the tears that slipped from her eyes, how she stroked back his hair, and traced the new scars on his back, from the wounds that almost took him from her.

The only time she has seen them.

* * *

Would it be better if there had been a funeral? If the great terrible thing that happened had not happened in war, but in the ordinary course of things. An accident, maybe. A collapse. If it had been something internal instead of—instead of what it was?

Would it be better? Or would it just be different?

* * *

There are no photographs, now. They have all been put away.

Photographs belong to a time outside of this.

* * *

(Their wedding portrait, hidden. To see the one who is missing, smiling, proud, as he was when he—as he was before—to see him there, as he once was, as if he might walk in the door. A mockery.)

* * *

There was a time her face was well known, a time when her name was spoken of with something akin to awe, a touch of wonder. When she was written of in gossip columns, her name posted up to attract a crowd.

She wonders if people remember her and who she was. Wonders if they would ever guess at how she had just wanted peace, to make music.

She never wanted peace at a cost like this.

Music feels so very far away.

* * *

(What would Erik think to know she has turned her back on it all? What would he think to know how the thought of singing makes her breath catch in her throat? She does not think he would understand, does not think he could.)

(Should she travel down beneath the opera, one more time, just to ask him? Just to know if he is alive or dead?)

(She wonders, but something always stays her, and turns her on another path.)

* * *

She passes people in the street and sees their pale faces, their pinched features, the ragged clothes they wear and trembling hands. She passes them and knows they look at her and think she is a lady and maybe she is, but she wears grey and they might know but they cannot understand the light that has gone out of her world.

* * *

She thinks, sometimes, that no one will ever understand each other again.

* * *

Raoul was there when his brother died.

She knows that much. He has told her that much, told her at the time though he has not spoken of it since.

He was there, and he was the one who tried to keep Philippe’s life from leaving his body, the one whose hands were stained in his blood, the one who spoke to him and tried to keep him awake, and watched as he choked on every breath.

The shrapnel tore through his chest.

He was dead before the stretcher ever arrived.

He never had to know that Raoul was the one it carried out.

* * *

She still has the two telegrams that came, has them hidden away because she cannot stand to see them, cannot stand to burn them.

The first to tell her that Raoul was wounded.

The second to tell her that Philippe was dead.

The same date on each of them, the same location, “we regret to inform…in action at…” and she held them both in her hands and knew, then, that they had been together.

* * *

It was only after, after they had transferred Raoul back to Paris to recover, that she knew for sure. She visited him in the hospital, and cradled his hand as he lay on his front, his back bandaged and painful, and he told her, his voice faint, groggy with grief, with pain, with morphine, told her of that day, and it is the one and only time they have ever spoken of it.

Maybe she should ask him, but maybe the silence is what he needs.

* * *

She is not sure she slept at all, after they sent him back up to the lines.

Every officer they brought into the hospital, she hoped it was a mistake, and hoped it was Philippe.

* * *

How many times did she sit beside a man and hold his hand as he died?

How many letters has she written to wives and mothers and sisters and daughters, who wrote to ask _how?_ and _did he speak of me?_ and _did he suffer?_

Sometimes, it is kinder to write lies.

* * *

The house never seemed so big before, so silent.

If she could, she would tear it down. Tear it down and start anew somewhere else, somewhere smaller. Somewhere where war seems like a made-up word and there are no men with eyes that hold the hollowness of the world. Somewhere where it might be possible to breathe, without feeling that every breath is a deception.

Somewhere that does not hold the memory of the dead in every corner.

Somewhere where time stopped, all those years ago, and has never started since.

(There is nowhere that such a place exists, and they will never outrun this.)

* * *

Would it be better if there was a grave they could visit?

Would it be better if there was any grave at all?

* * *

Chaste kisses, faint touches.

Maybe this is what he needs. Maybe this is all she can give.

* * *

There is to be a baby, but she has not told him yet.

She is not sure how. But sometimes, at night, in the times between when he sleeps and when he wakes, when it is her turn to be awake, she lies with her hand on her belly, and thinks of this new life growing within her, and she thinks he loves her still, though he has forgotten how to say it.

Her skin warm and soft, and she takes his hand and rests it above her navel, that their baby might know its father too.

She will find words to tell him before she starts to show. For now, she kisses the corner of his mouth, and knows that the time is not right.

There is something unseemly about bringing life into the world after so much death.

(Their baby, made of love. Their baby, safe beneath her heart. Their baby, born in the ashes of what went before)

(How can there be new life after this?)

* * *

Her husband’s breaths beside her, soft in sleep.

If time would stop, now, and cease, maybe then they could learn to go on.


End file.
